Looking back, I should have noticed how quiet Kael had gotten in the weeks since SCRUB came back online.
I didn't. I was too busy being happy.
SCRUB himself came back exactly as promised — beeping, booping, scuttling around underfoot with the same restless energy he'd always had, apparently no worse for the months of silence. He even had some new upgrades to his abilities.
Kael had been overjoyed the day it happened, genuinely overjoyed, the kind of relief that made him laugh too loud and hug people he didn't normally hug. I remembered that part clearly. What I hadn't clocked, in the weeks after, was that his joy had a shelf life, and once it expired, something quieter and more careful had moved in behind it.
I told myself he was just tired. Repairing a shattered consciousness crystal by crystal for the better part of a year would exhaust anyone. I didn't ask further, because asking further wasn't really something I'd made a habit of when it came to Kael.
That detail would matter later. At the time, I just noticed he seemed a little distant, so I had made sure to keep him company. We continued to test the firearm, which had seen another full incarnation and vast improvement. It was just as dangerous to a target while being less so to the wielder, and a little quieter. It was still incredibly loud, but I didn't go deaf every time I fired it.When Hask approached us about the Chattering Keep, we were somewhat anxious. It was our first real dungeon job since Grimwater, which none of us said out loud but all of us felt the shape of anyway. We had been taking it easy for months after what had happened, and we all felt a little rusty. Even more than that, all of us were terrified of another dungeon failure.But we agreed that all of our coin purses were a little too on the light side, so we took the job.The Chattering Keep was a high Class Three dungeon and was about as dungeon-y as they got. Deep underground, a castle in a giant cave. Overrun by goblins. Plenty of treasure for adventurers and plenty of mess for Janitors.With supplies in hand, we traveled south. It was raining that day, which we were glad for. The last few weeks had been slightly warmer than usual outside. We traveled in a covered wagon until we reached the hills beneath which our destination lay.We passed through the barrier and navigated a series of tunnels with no real incident. The monsters and traps were all much further in. We did see signs of the goblins, though; gruesome totems made of bones and rotting meat; half-eaten and long-abandoned bodies of what we were pretty sure were people.
We split into two groups once we reached the old gatehouse — Hask had gotten word from previous Janitor reports that this dungeon was prone to premature respawns, particularly in the throne room, and he wasn't about to let any of us anywhere near it without him.
"Sweep the east wing," he said, already checking the head of his mop like it might have changed since the last time he looked at it. "Standard cleanup. I'll take the throne room myself, deal with whatever's in there. I'm told there was a bugbear and two trolls in there last time."That sounded dangerous, but not overly so. Hask was taking it easy on us.
"Alone?" Tessa asked, though she already knew the answer.
"I've been doing this since before your grandmother was born, kid. Go."
Nobody argued with that logic. We rarely did.
The east wing had been, once, someone's idea of a treasury — high stone ceilings, the remains of what must have been an impressive vault door hanging half off its hinges, shelves along the walls that had probably held ledgers and account books a long time before anyone here started worshipping bones. Whoever ruled this castle before the goblins moved in had clearly had money. Now it just had dust, cobwebs, and the quiet of a room that had been picked over by several generations of increasingly less discerning looters. Of course, in reality, the dungeon was chock-full of treasure that Janitors never got to see, usually hidden. Adventuring parties claimed everything. I had always been amused by the fact that dungeons were always, functionally, a backdrop. Once we reset the Core, the treasure would return with the monsters and freshly-reset traps.
"Cozy," Kael said, already crouching to examine the floor near the doorway. "Give me a second before anyone touches anything."
Tessa wandered toward a collapsed shelf, poking at something that might once have been a scroll. Alara stood near the center of the room, eyes half-closed, presumably doing whatever it was she did to feel out lingering mana before it became a problem.
I found the chest sitting exactly where a chest in a room like this should sit — dead center, slightly raised on a stone dais, ornate enough to have once mattered to somebody. It also sported considerably more fangs than a normal treasure chest and a long, disgusting tongue that drooped to the floor. That told me everything I needed to know before I got close enough to confirm it.
"We've got a dead chest mimic," I called out.
I set down my pack and got to work. Mop in hand, I used magic to fill the bucket with water and added a capful of Grime Reaper. This had become so mundane and routine, it felt wild to think that I had almost burnt my hand to the bone with this stuff on my first dungeon run in the Ebon Maw."You want a hand with that?" Kael's voice, from somewhere behind me, closer than I expected.
I glanced back. He'd finished with the floor near the door — no traps there, apparently — and was looking at the mimic with professional curiosity.
"Sure. Grab the other side."
He did, and we worked in the easy, wordless rhythm we'd built over a year of doing exactly this kind of thing together — him steadying the carcass while I worked the solution into the joints where the old magic liked to cling longest. It reminded me, a little, of the Unnamed City. Different mess, same quiet companionship.Once the mimic had been mopped up and the dais was clear, I emptied the bucket with magic while Kael set about looking for traps. It didn't take him long. He pulled a stone free from the far wall and observed a mess of mechanisms."There's a pressure plate near your left foot. Careful. It triggers iron bars that block the door."I stepped gingerly away from it. "Good catch."Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author."Thanks," he responded quietly. "Come help me with this?"I joined him and followed his instructions –place my hand there, hold something back, turn a lever at the same time as he twisted something else. I noticed his expression wasn't that of complete focus on the job. He was calculating something. I didn't think too much of it.
"You know," Kael said, after a while, not looking up from his work, "I never really told you about my brother."
That was not where I expected the sentence to go.
"Your brother?"
"Corwin." He said the name carefully, with a far-off expression. "Older than me. I was twelve when he died. Mining crew, working a dungeon some outfit hadn't bothered cleaning properly. Trap that should've been disarmed."I blinked slowly.
"Kael, I—"
"Nobody ever tells that story with the boring parts in it," he went on, like he hadn't heard me. "The boring part is that it wasn't a monster or a curse or anything with a story to it. It was a pressure plate somebody got paid to check and didn't. My parents never really forgave me for what happened after — I got obsessed. Traps, mechanisms, how things fail. They thought it was morbid. Maybe it was. I just wanted to understand the thing that took him, so nothing like it would ever get to surprise me again."
"I didn't know any of that."
"Of course you didn't." He finally looked up. Nothing in his expression was warm.
"You've never asked."
Something in the room went very still.
"Kael—"
"I applied to three artificer's guilds before I was fourteen. Got turned away from all of them. No name, no money, no formal training, just a kid who wouldn't stop talking about trigger mechanisms. Hask's the first person who ever looked at what I built and told me to keep going. That's why I'd walk into fire for him. You'd know that, if you'd ever once asked me a single question about my life that wasn't about whatever I happened to be building at the time."
He set down the tool in his hand.
"I know about Lake Fortescue."
The words landed like ice water.
"SCRUB saw you. Months before Grimwater and you did that thing. You used that Skill on purpose. You knew how it worked. You used it in the lake before that. To escape the Shitfish."I recalled the moment. At the bottom of the lake. Trying to remove a hunk of elginarium from the den of a sick river monster. The mutated fish. Night Step."Kael, I can explain—"
"You don't know anything about me," he said, quiet now, which was somehow worse than shouting. "I was okay with that, for whatever reason. We were friends. It didn't bother me that you never asked. But this is different. You've been intentionally hiding stuff. So I figure it's about time you learned something about honesty."
He reached down, almost casually, and pulled a pin free from a gear, which spun freely.
Somewhere above the doorway, iron groaned.
I turned in time to see the bars crash down across the only way out, dust and centuries-old grit raining down around them.
Kael straightened up, entirely unbothered, and looked at me with an expression I'd never seen on him before.
"We need to talk."
"Talk," I repeated. My voice didn't sound like mine. "Kael, I wasn't trying to—"
"I know exactly what you were trying to do." He crossed his arms, and for the first time since I'd met him, there was nothing playful underneath it.
"You were trying to protect us. That's what you always tell yourself, isn't it? Keep the scary thing to yourself so nobody else has to carry it. You're learning about your past, who you were before the amnesia, and couldn't be bothered to tell your family, who've all been worried about you and your poor brain, because you don't trust us to help you."
"That's not—"
"It's exactly that. I know, because it's what I did too. After Corwin. I decided I'd just handle everything myself from then on, understand every mechanism so nothing could blindside me again, and you know what that got me? Nothing. It got me alone. It got me building things in a room by myself until Hask found me and told me I didn't have to. I figured you'd eventually tell me what was going on after Grimwater. But you didn't. And now you're going to."At that moment, I heard footsteps; Tessa and Alara had arrived. They pressed up against the bars."Lorne! Kael!" Tessa's voice was high-pitched and worried. "Are you okay?!Kael looked over at her. "Yeah, we're fine. You're just in time to have a chat with Lorne."
"Kael—" Alara started
"Not yet, Alara." He didn't look away from me. "I'm getting the truth."
I looked from Kael to the girls on the other side of the bars and back again. He didn't seem compromised. He was utterly calm and collected. I realized what had happened. He'd been sitting on the knowledge of Lake Fortescue. Felt angry and betrayed. And when he had found the trap in this room, he decided it was time to act.
I didn't get the sense that he was going to hurt me, and it was clear he knew how to reverse the trap. So my only response was to sigh.
"How long," I asked. "How long have you known?"
"Three weeks."
Three weeks. He'd known for three weeks and said nothing, planned this, waited for exactly the right moment, and I didn't know whether to be angry about that or recognize, with an unpleasant jolt, that it was precisely the kind of thing I would have done.
"Why now? Why like this?"
"Because you'll find a way to make it small if I don't." His voice cracked, just slightly, the first sign that the calm was costing him something. "You'll say a few careful sentences and move on and it'll be over before anyone actually has to feel it. I needed you to feel it. I needed you trapped somewhere you couldn't just walk away from once it got uncomfortable, because that's what you do, Lorne. You disappear. Sometimes literally."
That landed harder than anything else he'd said.
The room was quiet except for the faint drip of water somewhere behind the shelves.
"Okay," I said, finally. "Then let's talk."
Kael looked at me for a long moment, like he hadn't quite expected me to actually say it.
"Everything," he said. "Not the summary. Not the version that makes you look least bad. Everything."
I looked at Tessa, who nodded once, small and steady. I looked at Alara, who said nothing, which from her was its own kind of permission.
I took a breath.
"Okay."Kael sat, arms and legs crossed, on the stone floor. I sat across from him. And I told him everything. From waking up in the House of Healing to the dart trap in the Ebon Maw; the Silk Runners; my fudged console; the depths of the conspiracy; LeGrange and the job offer. I told him what Hask and I had been working on and what we knew. It took a long time. I spared no detail. I couldn't afford to. If Kael really felt like this, I needed to come all the way clean or lose him. I even showed him my console.As my story progressed, so did his expression. He started angry, then went to angry-and-concerned, then concerned-and-slightly-in-awe, then angry again. By the time I was finished, he just looked tired.I took a deep breath as I finished and let it out slowly.Kael didn't say anything for a long moment. I was worried that this was the moment he would snap and yell at me.What came next was worse than that.